This award will fund the purchase of a Cisco 10 Gigabit/s switch and wavelength division multiplexing equipment to construct a three-way high-speed data link between science and engineering research groups affiliated with the Computational Science Research Center (CSRC) at San Diego State University (SDSU), the TeraGrid hub at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CalIT2) at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). This network infrastructure will provide core data transmission resources for research groups at SDSU in physical chemistry, geophysics, astronomy, bioinformatics, thermal science, combustion engineering, fluid dynamics, nonlinear dynamics, ocean modeling, and computer science who routinely use SDSC and CalIT2 computing resources. The wavelength division multiplexing equipment will enable rapid network transactions between the two campuses, thereby allowing researchers at SDSU to rapidly transfer terabytes of data generated on TeraGrid clusters back to SDSU for local visualization and post-processing. The core 10 Gigabit/s switch will initially interconnect server room facilities at SDSU in two separate colleges: the College of Science and the College of Engineering. The switch will also provide several additional 10 Gigabit/s interfaces for individual research laboratories to connect and thereby form a high-speed research backbone network on the SDSU campus. Research projects that will immediately make use of this network infrastructure include (1) the development of a service oriented architecture/cyberinfrastructure of chemical equilibrium and kinetic services used to model gas turbine NOx emissions in syngas combustion, (2) the development of a cyberinfrastructure for the General Curvilinear Ocean Model (GCOM),(3) computational quantum mechanical studies of floppy reactive intermediates, (4) the numerical investigation of high-order particle-source-in-cell (PSIC) methods for the simulation of pulse detonation engines, and (5) the development of PetaShake, a petascale implementation of the TeraShake parallel Anelastic Wave Model (AWM) code that simulates earthquake scenarios using several billion grid points. These projects currently place heavy demands on the existing SDSU campus network. SDSU researchers now require greater throughput and shorter delay when exchanging datasets and this grant will provide a much needed improvement to SDSU-UCSD network connectivity by funding the necessary equipment to facilitate rapid data transfer between the two universities. In addition to faculty and graduate student use, this network infrastructure will be used by undergraduate students working on projects that include (1) senior thesis research projects in computer science and computer engineering, (2) programming projects in courses such as computer networking, high-speed network design, client-server programming, and distributed computing, and (3) undergraduate research carried out under existing, externally funded fellowship programs. SDSU occupies a strong position for making these opportunities available to minorities underrepresented in science and engineering research, as one of the top ten campuses in the nation granting bachelor's degrees to ethnic minorities.
